Some of those — particularly the first one — will be "ironic" likes. Saying you like something on Facebook doesn't mean you actually like it, after all. But others won't; and it's hard to imagine the Chinese government particularly caring if someone expressed support for Falun Gong "ironically" or not.

“My wife’s cousin recently moved here from India. She’s single,” he says, as he begins clicking through his Facebook profile. “I love to meddle in my family’s lives.”

Mr Stocky sets parameters for the search of his social network account. He’s looking for friends of his friends who are single men, who live in San Francisco and who are originally from India. A few more clicks and Mr Stocky has a list of romantic prospects for his wife’s cousin, culled from his own personal network.

The question left is whether this will be a storm in a teacup which will eventually rewire our normal expectations of privacy — as with the introduction of the News Feed on Facebook or the first forays into "social advertising" — or something which could damage Facebook, as the "Girls around me" app did with Foursquare and Google's initial attempts to leverage Gmail's network did with Google Buzz.